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Actually Scott, from where I am on this dusty (ummm......soggy where I am) old globe, it's Sunday 2 Jan here but Saturday 1 Jan where you are.......Could you be "yesterday's man" ??????? lol......... :-) Naaaaah......stick around, we're having too much fun.

In the immediate locality, nowhere near as bad as it could have been. The sub-soil is like a sponge though ~ there is so much water in it now that it liquifies under any pressure (like a car tyre) and turns into a sludge; if you deviate off the driveway, you'll bog. We used to get cut off by the local creek near the showground, but not this time....so far. Our shire council maintained dirt road looks like the Grand Canyon complete with ravines and boulders and the council has actually put in a damaged road sign - lots of help to a motorist who damages his car because some of the damage cannot be seen until you are right on top of it. I have been forced to do road repairs so I can get in and out of our property. We need about two weeks of sun, but at the moment I can't see the weather doing that. Our house is immune to flooding.

Towards Kingaroy, Barkers Creek came very close to cutting the D'Aguilar Highway and there were certainly huge floods over its flats. Our biggest problems have been flooding of local creeks off the main roads but we have not had the dreadful flooding that others have had both further north and inland. Luckily, Blackbutt is right at the edge of the Blackbutt Range itself and the relatively hilly countryside ensures that run-off takes place quite quickly.

And you ? I don't know the topography of where you live so I couldn't even guess how you have fared but I hope you haven't suffered water damage ?

@Ridcully, we're South of Childers, west of Hervey Bay and north of Maryborough, on the Burrum River, as I mentioned in another thread where the Bridge is at Burrum Town the river hit a 6 to 7 meter Flood peak (the bridge is abot 4 meters). It didn't affect us as we're on high ground, Our dam is full and overflowing (we're on a 1 acre property with a Damn at the bottom, we're at the top of the hill). The ground is pretty sodden, enough for some of the fence posts to pull out of the ground. But I did manage to get the ride on out and mow around the house and the road frontage, yesterday.

We're getting more rain today, mostly short heavy cloud bursts wit thunder and lightning, but most of the lightning seems to be over the bay or out over Fraser Island.

During the peak of the storm people were evacuated from Pacific Haven, they're on the convergence of the Burrum and Chervil rivers, and pretty low lying as well. A friend of ours has about half a meter of water over her property, says she has fish swimming i her front yard.

Those floods must be the worst in many decades. There is a strong La Nina operating at present in the Pacific but this sounds like a real outlier even in those conditions. I hope everything works out in the end but it sounds pretty grim. I read that the area flooded was bigger than NSW which is amazing.

@montezuma.......indeed they are.....If I have the dates correct, I think these are the worst since about 1973 however the weather forecasts suggest that the La Nina conditions will become neutral about the end of March....and cyclones (our version of the American hurricane) are predicted for the Queensland coastline during the next three months and they dump huge amounts of rain.

For those that want to keep up with the news, here's the latest bulletin from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the govt funded tv network - it's usually pretty good, and no adverts:

Rockhampton is north of where Tracyanne lives by approx. 200km and about 350-400 north of me. Huge amounts of water will now be moving down the inland water ways and while it is going to do enormous good to those rivers (they've been in drought and overexploited), there are going to be increased flood problems along those waterways in inland NSW I should think.

I wouldn't let this very unusual season bother you dinotrac; Australia has climates to suit all tastes. Right now in high summer, Tasmania has had a cold snap with a sprinkling of snow on Mt Wellington just beside the state capital of Hobart and Perth (the state capital over in Western Australia) is having heat waves of up to 40 degrees with bush fire threats as a bonus. Flood, fire and snow.......take your pick. But honestly, this is unusual and normally, here in south east Queensland, the climate is delightful: coolish to cold winters with frost, and warm summers with only the central three months of December, January and February sometimes hot and humid. But spectacular thunderstorms help to cool things down a little. Love it.

@gus3 Okay, I'll throw a dart at the northern hemisphere.......if you are around 40 degrees in winter, your summers must be a real blast. The only places similar I can think of here in Australia are out in the back of beyond like Birdsville which is on the edge of what we call the Simpson Desert.....but which in fact is populated with arid tolerant plants and animals. No, with a temp like that, I was just wondering if you were somewhere here as well.

The scale isn't shown but you can get an idea of the size from the fact that a direct line from Brisbane to Rockhampton is about 520km, and Brisbane going almost directly west to St George is about 400km. These inland areas are often very wide plains which undulate at most and so flooding spreads very widely and is very slow to return to normal river levels. You can easily find my location of Blackbutt.